back to article Microsoft offers Bing filth quick fix

Embarrassed by Bing's taste for porn, Microsoft's come up with a fix - only you better like having to fiddle with your network or browser settings. Microsoft's announced a short-term work around so parents, businesses and schools whose kids, employees or students search using Bing can keep their home PCs and networks filth …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Tail - Dog?

    Hello Mr Dog, this is your tail, he will be telling you what to do.

    I'm slightly less than impressed

  2. Allan Dyer
    Black Helicopters

    psychological underware?

    "It's an embarrassing slip that's going to do more for Bing's fortunes than any $100m-TV advertising campaign."

    Perhaps more of a Freudian slip?

  3. Adam White

    Self-censorship?

    So the idea that you can configure your proxy server to automatically add adlt=strict to any www.bing.com URL it sees? Does Microsoft ISA server have this feature?

    Or do they expect naughty school boys to append adlt=strict to all their searches?

  4. James

    Not unusual

    The fix they've offered is pretty much standard practice to enforce strict filtering on search engines, nothing new there.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One has to conclude that nobody at MS ever watched Friends

    aficionados will recall that the show had a character named Bing, who also had a notable taste for porn. And Miss Congeniality.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    I dunn get it

    doesn't google show pictures of porn if you turn off SafeSearch and look for it? Why does this suddenly deserve all this attention?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Still got a stupid name though!

    The sooner Bing dies a death the better. What a stupid name, have they not learned anything from Google? What dumb ass management consultants did they hire to come up with that one for a 7 figure fee no doubt. Even I could have got a copy of "My First Onomatopoeias" and got bored reading through page 2... the B's!

    Google has become a verb and common in normal language but it remains a "propper" verb so people use Google (unlike Hoover which is just general use for any vacuum). You can use Google, google something while away the time googling. How awkward is use Bing, bing something and while away the time binging?

    I'm no MS hater but their branding really is shite. Live? Bing?

    FFS at least shove an e on the end so we have MS binge... or MS bilge... or MS Bingo...

    [BTW note to Microsoft... I retain the rights to Bingo as a search engine name because it is actually quite good.]

  8. Daniel

    The hackiest hack in the history of hacky hacks

    Surely, most people would have to have submitted the search, in the first place, in order to find out what the search string would look like? Then (we presume) they are supposed to close their eyes to all the thrusting flesh, and shut off their ears to the sobbing and slobbering, going on, on the search results page, they DID arrive at, and type in 'addit=strict' into the address bar and resubmit. This is great work.

    If it was me, I'd open the Searchresults.Output class, find my link.echo method and append 'addit=strict' to the output string, but hey! - I'm guessing Microsoft cannot do this because Bing's Searchresults.Output class has circular dependencies that revolve upwards and downwards through the server's kernel nine times, by way of the TCP/IP stack, the Audio output layer and three different video codec routines. After all it's not REAL Microsoft code, until it's gotten the Hardware abstraction layer involved in some way, is it?

    It looks like you're writing an operating system? Would you like me to help?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "only you better like having to fiddle with your network or browser settings"

    What? Are you taking the piss? I recognise that typing a URL into the address bar might be considered technical by some people but I don't see how that can possibly be described as above.

    Am I missing the joke? Someone whoooosh me.

  10. DZ-Jay

    Re: I dunn get it

    @AC: "doesn't google show pictures of porn if you turn off SafeSearch and look for it?"

    Perhaps, but it does not play the embedded videos automagically when you put your mouse over them on a screen-full of porn search result videos. You can click on the links normally to go the external site, but--and here's the kicker--you *don't have to*!

    Instant pr0n preview FTW!

    P.S. And may I say that the pr0n search is actually quite accurate and relevant. Er, or so I heard.

    -dZ.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    porn

    porn makes the world (and the web) go round... if they get good porn results, then people will use Bing more. simples. Clever move by MS as now they are getting lots of porn-press, which no doubt lots of people will go and try out (just to see what all the fuss is about, of course)...

    Microsoft oversight? Er, no, marketing, it's all about the marketing.

    Paris, cause a 10 second preview is all she needs.

  12. Trygve

    @AC "Am I missing the joke? "

    No, you're just a moron. Individual users who don't want to see porn don't have to, obviously. The issue is how do you stop individuals who DO want to see porn from accessing it via the network you control in an office/school/monastery/prison/deathstar/whatever.

    Microsofts suggestion seems far more complex than the obvious alternative of just redirecting bing.com to google.com, which is what I'd do.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    What on earth is Micro$oft thinking?

    One has to wonder how long it's going to take for the fine folks out in Redmond to figure it out than MSFT is on the wan. Slowly and inexorably the UNIX and Linux O/Ss (which is now everything but Windows) are making Microsoft irrelavent. Funny, back in the 1990s we were all told that the opposite was going to be the final outcome: UNIX and Apple were given just a few short years of life left as the unstoppable Microsoft train ran them down. Yeah, most of us giggled at the idea. Google, Apple, IBM, Sun, and others are (once again) years ahead of MSFT in building the next generation net and services. And now, they think they can compete with Google? Ridiculous. They should be investing their money into transforming their productivity apps to an SOA model and finally taking that much needed course in computer security. The days of a full-blown desktop or laptop with a full O/S are coming to an end for the average user. MSFT doesn't seem to get this.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    another one.

    @Trygve - hey, nice of you to call someone a moron! i wonder if you'd say that to his face in the real world?! easy to be the big man on the net, eh?...

  15. Alan Esworthy
    Flame

    @AC (a/k/a "moron") 14:32

    Just where does one find a face to say such things to when that face hides behind the Anonymous Coward mask? Trygve is proved correct, you are indeed a moron.

    If it matters, at 6'1" and 21 stone I am a big man anywhere I go.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @Alan Esworthy

    hiding behind an AC doesn't mean someone is outright rude though does it?

    You're point doesn't stack up, the AC comments would and could be said to someone's face, as they are not being rude to anyone, whereas i doubt whether Trygve or yourself, Alan, would call someone a Moron to their face in the real world! you have a nice screen and the net to hide behind. That is just plain rude.

    if you would call someone a moron to their face, then i guess that speaks volumes.

  17. System 10 from Navarone
    Coat

    The Road to Unusable Crap

    Not newsworthy, but Friday afternoon's are a bit quiet and I have a theory about Micorsoft's naming of Bing. Is it some sort of followup to Microsoft Bob?

    Also probably not newsworthy but just noticed that if you type 'unusable crap' into Bing, top of the list that comes back is a link to Microsoft's own Windows XP page. The source actually contains the words 'unusable+crap'.

    Why is this? It doesn't happen with Google...is this some sort of Microsoft attempt at Honesty? What's going on?!?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It works, but not perfectly.

    I just tried it. It still let some adult images leak through - although it did a pretty good job overall.

  19. /dev/me
    Paris Hilton

    So this is their plan...

    Browsing pr0n, better with Bing.com (it almost rhymes)

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    @Daniel

    PMSL!

    At least you didn't have do download the source code, compile it, then take an hour typing in arcane command lines and modifying the sys.ini.linuxiscomplcted.youarenotageek.conf file before you got it working in 640x480 screen mode.

    Oh, wait... Didn't I just click and things worked?

    Paris, cos I got to admit she is better looking than Tux

  21. Mike Forsyth
    Paris Hilton

    Having a Bing

    Excellent - try searching for Bing and you get a video of 'Busty CARMELLA BING' with a lingerie clad lovely and she is not reciting poetry.

    So I guess the marketing chaps were thinking more along the lines of Binging as in Googling and not

    did you have a good Bing last night, yes I was Binging all night or I feel like a Bing right now...

    It is better than Live Search at least

    Paris cos she is better than Live Search too

    Mike

  22. Mr Bear
    Stop

    Block the search engine.

    I'm planning on blocking 'bing' in all the schools I deal with, after having to drive an hour to one school to deal with a virus problem. Turns out that they used bing and most of the sites it came up with led to lots of those dodgy sites that come up telling you, 'you have thousands of viruses on your system and need to download some malware in order to actually get thousands of viruses on your system.'

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